DVD Releases and News

Netflix Launches Movie Downloads, er, sorta

When we first ran into the headline this week that "Netflix has begun movie downloads," the geek side of our brains (it's just to the left and slightly behind the cerebellum) had an instant nerdgasm. Instantly, the future was here in all its "Bladerunner"-ish, "Snow Crash"-able, "Otherland"-ifiable glory. Visions of the digital age danced through our heads - a world where DVDs were finally extinct and the fluidity of digital media allowed us to experience immediate gratification on our new, ginormous HD television sets.

Clicking through the link to the article, reality quickly came crashing down like a police raid on a 70's hash party - it seems Netflix is merely offering streaming movies. Oh.

On the surface, the move appears to be a baby step into the true download service many have been waiting for from Netflix. First off, it's not available to everyone (it's not activated in our account yet). Netflix plans to slowly make it available to all users over the next 6 months, so keep an eye out for the "Watch Now" tab at the top of your account. Next, you can only watch the movie in a browser (IE, specifically - sucky point number 3). While we appreciate Netflix not requiring us to download some crappy software a la Amazon Unbox, we have to wonder when the MPAA is going to catch on to the fact that people are downloading DIVX compressed AVI's via Bittorrent because they like the flexibility of a non-DRM'ed file. Imagine being able to download the movie file itself to your hard drive, and then doing whatever you want with it (copy to iPod, burn to DVD, etc). Sure, some people will share it via P2P networks, but then again, people are already doing that! This would allow paying customers the right to files they have actually purchased (while also making them extremely happy).

Having said all that, we do see a few advantages to this first step into the digital arena for Netflix subscribers. Being able to preview a questionable movie and determine that it sucks toe before adding it to your queue is certainly a neat feature. We can also see ourselves using this while traveling on one of our pimped out DVDF business trips (you've heard the legends, right?). Being able to stream a movie on our laptops in a hotel room (snubs nose at the hotel VOD service) makes our celluloid-filled skin cells tingle with delight.

The "Watch Now" service will allow you to watch 1 hour of streaming video for every dollar you already pay to Netflix, so if you're a $17.99 subscriber that's 18 hours of video streaming per month. Currently, about 1,000 titles are available, and Netflix plans on bumping that number up to 5,000 over this coming year. Depending on your connection speed (and how badly the Netflix servers are getting hammered), you can theoretically receive up to DVD quality streams.

Now let's wait for the Windows MCE and MythTV plugins to roll in, as well as a tie-in with Apple's newly announced Apple TV box, allowing us to stream to our televisions, and then you've got a much more compelling feature. Wake us when the true downloads arrive, and then maybe we'll get a little more excited.

Source: Engadget